A Hard Night in New York

On Monday night, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was trying to explain the smells in the city: oil in the water, industrial fluids, and the electric smell of water on the third rail of the subway tracks. He told a CBS reporter that, and added that he was on his way to Ground Zero, where the almost-finished One World Trade Center—the Freedom Tower—was flooding, too. But the smells were less shocking than the light and the noise: an explosionreported at a Con Edison transformer station—a plant near the far east end of Fourteenth Street, with a Little League baseball field tucked next to it—an event in a different category than the precautionary shutdowns that Con Ed had called customers about all day. Most of the lights below Thirty-ninth Street in Manhattan were off—more than six hundred thousand customers were without power in boroughs across the city, about seven million in the region—and it was hard to say when they would come back on.

And then there was the shock of what couldn’t be seen: much of the F.D.R. Drive, West Street, and the promenade by the Hudson—all flooded. The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel was filling with salt water—one of those moments when you remember being told in grade school that the Hudson isn’t properly a river but a tidal estuary. Seven subway tunnels were flooded, too, with the tracks too efficiently moving the surge from station to station, all now closed. Five people have reportedly died in the state, and sixteen altogether. There is too much water, and too many 911 calls. The façade fell off a building in Chelsea. A crane was dangling over Fifty-seventh Street. The carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park looked like a floating raft of shipwrecked horses. The surge had already been over thirteen feet in the Battery. (I’ll update this post as more details become available.)

“Do not drive,” the Mayor said in a press conference after 10 P.M. Lights were flickering far uptown. “Stay wherever you are. Let me repeat that.” Bloomberg praised those who had evacuated when he told them to: “Most New Yorkers have followed our advice…. But not everybody.” He did say that the tide would recede in a matter of hours, and that that would help.

This is not all about New York: Atlantic City looked given over to the Atlantic, and the ocean surged at points up and down the East Coast. “The devastation is unprecedented,” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said on Tuesday morning. He described houses being torn from their foundations and ending up on roads, and said that he’d been talking to the President. There is also the storm’s effect on the Presidential election. (And, as Philip Gourevitch writes, admonitions, in news from Syria and elsewhere, that a lot of people have it a lot worse.) A Times article on the storm was full of big numbers: tropical-storm force winds four hundred and eighty-five miles from the center of the storm; thirteen thousand flights cancelled. Closer to home came the note that the Statue of Liberty’s caretaker had had to flee.

Any number of financial institutions won’t open for days: that is a measure of the city’s economic importance. (CNN said that there were conflicting reports about whether the New York Stock Exchange was flooded.) But there are so many other measures of its importance, as well. It’s a great city, and a wonderful town, having a hard night.